Prof. Dr. Michael Wurm

This year’s Nobel Prize for the discovery of cosmic high-energy neutrinos is the latest chapter in a long story: much of what we know about neutrinos was first revealed by natural sources – the Sun, the Earth’s atmosphere, supernovae, and now the distant universe. Above all, these observations showed that neutrinos have mass, providing the first clear evidence for physics beyond the Standard Model. This talk gives a pedagogical overview of what we know about neutrinos as particles and what remains open. I will discuss the neutrino mass ordering in light of the first results from the JUNO reactor experiment and its complementarity to atmospheric neutrino measurements with KM3NeT/ORCA and IceCube, as well as the search for leptonic CP violation. I will contrast direct limits on the absolute neutrino mass from KATRIN with increasingly stringent cosmological bounds, and review the status of neutrinoless double beta decay as the key test of whether neutrinos are their own antiparticles (so-called Majorana particles). I will close with an outlook on next-generation experiments and on neutrino telescopes as particle physics laboratories at the highest energies.